The College’s IT department had been frustrated by the fact its ageing technology infrastructure required an increasing amount of maintenance time and created higher power bills.

“We thought about how best to scale-up and simplify our infrastructure and defined our storage and CPU needs. Our technology road map indicated that we were facing a quadrupling of resources for the network. We also knew it would have to work effectively from day one if we were to gain and hold that teacher and student confidence,” explained ICT manager Luke Georgiou

A joint solution from HP and Trident

The College invited HP Partner, Trident Computer Services, to discuss the challenge. “As a technology

adviser, Trident had proved proactive and knowledgeable. It had previously given us great support and advice. It brought HP into the discussion and HP introduced us to the HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure and the HP EVA solution,” explains Georgiou. And if you have been following HP for the past few years this is exactly why HP had developed the Converged Infrastructure technology. HP Converged Infrastructure accelerates the provisioning of IT services & applications through shared pools of interoperable resources of servers, storage, network, and management.

A range of savings and benefits

With its shared infrastructure for fans, power supplies, Ethernet switching and storage, the blade solution delivered IT cost savings and a factor of manageability that made it well suited to the College’s needs. It occupied a smaller physical footprint than the rack mount servers previously deployed by the College.

“The price was right and the features offered were stronger than the competitive solutions we considered. Among the many positives, one of the biggest advantages was the simplicity of the HP EVA solution and how we only needed to look to one source for assistance,” says Georgiou. “This was quite a burden taken off our IT team’s shoulders as staff no longer needed to specialize in products from different vendors. In the past, disk changeovers or firmware updates on SANs or blades could take more than a week, but now our IT team can hot-swap the blades and change things on the fly. That is a much more elegant way of doing things than pulling the system apart.”

HP Insight Control was chosen as the SAN and blade server management and monitoring software solution. The proactive monitoring conducted by HP was a new experience. “We are now alerted to a problem before it happens. In the past it had not been uncommon to wait while three suppliers debated the issue, meaning the turnaround time could stretch to a week,” explains Georgiou.

Click here to learn more on how Caroline Chisholm Catholic College replaced their ageing server and storage infrastructure to take advantage of the Australian Federal Government’s ‘digital education revolution.

Business Benefits:

Reduced power needs are expected to deliver 30 per cent cost savings

Allowed IT staff to do more with their time thanks to greater productivity

Eliminated inefficiency and duplication through dealing with three vendors